LogFAQs > #963152260

Letters - a written adventure (Switch)
Once every year or two or three, I find a game that is... for lack of a better word... special. There are quite a few qualifications that these "special" games all meet:
-They must be relatively niche. They don't have to be some ultra-obscure indie title with less than 1000 downloads, but something super mainstream just won't cut it. I consider Life is Strange to be one of these "special" games to me and that's probably cutting it pretty close.
-I've already known of their existence and have a vague idea what they are/might be like, and have them in the back of my head as something I might play someday, but then something very specific brings the game to the forefront of my mind and prompts me to play it quite suddenly.
-In terms of content, some aspect of the game (gameplay, story elements, artistic direction, etc) is unlike any other game I've ever played or known about (doesn't mean there are zero others, I just haven't played or known about them) (and for bonus points, this element catches me by surprise), and quality-wise it exceeds my expectations (doesn't have to be a masterpiece or instantly disturb my top 10 or anything, but just be better than I thought it would be).
-I have to find some sort of connection to the game beyond just being a video game that I enjoy. Something about it has to touch me emotionally. For this reason, games that would qualify for the "Games for Impact" category at The Game Awards generally make for good candidates.
-This one is the hardest to explain, but also the most important - it had to be exactly what I needed at the time I played it. Whether its unique gameplay broke up the monotony of my recent gaming experiences, its themes connected to my current life situation, or some combination of everything in between, I played this game at just the right time.

With all of these factors in mind, I've found my latest "special" game. It's a very recent indie romp called Letters - a written adventure.

Let's break it down piece by piece. Is it niche? It's recent (less than a month old), it's indie, it only has like five playthroughs so far on Youtube, and it doesn't even have a page on Wikipedia. If Life is Strange qualifies, this is a slam dunk.

How did I get to playing it? It had come up as an advertisement as a Steam game in my Facebook feed quite a few times and the description sounded intriguing. Not being much of a PC gamer (even for something like this that would probably run fine on my 7-year-old not-really-gaming-equipped laptop), I checked to see if it was also on consoles and it was also on Switch. Perfect. If I ever decided to play it, I was going that route. The other day I saw in my Youtube feed that an ASMRtist I was subscribed to had uploaded a playthrough. Apparently she received some requests to play the game and the publisher actually saw the comments and sent her a key to the game. Feeling like this might be the kind of game I needed right then and there (I'll get to that in a bit), I decided to buy and download it and begin playing it that night.

The content was definitely not what I was expecting! I was expecting this to be very much like what Radical Dreamers seems to be (despite me not having played that game yet) - basically a novel with just enough interactivity to consider it a "game." Boy was I wrong. You play as a girl named Sarah at various stages of her life, via letters to her pen pal Katya. However, rather than just reading her letters, you actually play as a sprite version of Sarah running through her letters in a platformer-like manner. On every page there is a series of conversations and obstacles that you need to clear in order to progress, and you can do this by picking up words from the letter that can help fill in the conversation or clear the obstacle. Sometimes you really have to think, and often times the word isn't obvious at all - it's actually hidden in a larger word. I can safely say I know of no other games like this! I can say for sure that the quality was better than I was expecting. It's fun, it's engaging, and it's accessible. You can really customize Sarah to be either a reflection of yourself or a unique individual. You can't play as a boy, and her main personality traits are either fixed or determined by some choices you make in the story, but you can customize her skin color, hair color, fashion sense, a few basic hobbies/interests, and even her sexual orientation, allowing a diverse gaming population the opportunity to really see themselves as Sarah if they want. The gameplay is fun and simple, and while some of the solutions can be tricky, none of them are frustratingly obscure. The story and writing are both very good. It deals with some "tough stuff" and the characters, as seen through Sarah's eyes at her various life stages anyway, are not bad. The music was really, really nice. If you're a love it when music perfectly suits the mood of a game, especially in "impact"-type games, you won't be disappointed. The art style was REALLY creative. My biggest complaint is the length. It's very short (I didn't time myself but I'd say it took me somewhere around 2 and a half hours), and it gets to its conclusion rather abruptly. Just when I thought it was headed into a new act, it instead dove right into the epilogue. That being said, there are some branching story elements that ought to give it some decent replay value.

I definitely found a connection to the game. I'll get more into some of this in the next paragraph, but I could relate to some (not all) of the situations that came up for Sarah. At the story branches I often found myself torn between what I would do and what I wanted Sarah to do. I'm not sure exactly what I was hoping for for an ending but I was satisfied with what I got. Most of all though, it was nostalgic for me. Sarah was born in 1987. I was born in 1989, so it was very cool for me to see her with various pop culture (vaguely of course) and technology that I had at pretty much the same age.

And the timing. I've very much been in a dark place for the last year or so, and despite some upswings, it's honestly gotten worse. I've found video games as a source of comfort, but lately they've been causing me more stress than relief. I seem to be getting worse at them, and they are just making me feel like even more of a failure. But this one was a very nice, easy, accessible, unique game that really broke that up and served as a bit of a "reset" for me. Furthermore, having a game like this with an emotional element helped me out a lot. It actually broke me at one point and I was finally able to cry, not really about the game, but about a lot of things in my life, and I hope that maybe that will have helped and provided me with a lot of relief as well. This was just something really nice to have during my struggle.

I know this was a really long review for such a short game but I wanted to make sure I got out what I needed to say (and I'm sure I still missed a lot). Since it's so new and still pretty obscure, I'm probably one of the first people to write a piece like this on it, and I want more people to play it if it sounds like something they might enjoy. As I said before, I don't think it's a masterpiece, and forget top 10, I'm not even sure if I'd call it one of my top 100 games of all time, but there's definitely something there that I think could make it catch on, and I'll definitely be looking into what else this developer has to offer. If you're on a budget, the $15 price tag might seem a bit hefty, and you might want to think about waiting for a sale, but if you can get it on sale, you're not on a budget, are willing to pay that much for what you've heard, or just want to pay full price to support a very small developer, if this intrigues you even a little bit, I say go for it.